Robert S. Olick

Robert S. Olick, J.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Bioethics and Humanities. He earned his law degree at Duke University and his doctorate in philosophy and bioethics at Georgetown University and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. Before joining the Center in 2001, he taught in the College of Medicine and the College of Law at the University of Iowa, and served as Executive Director of the New Jersey Bioethics Commission where he was involved in the crafting of public policy on a range of bioethical issues.

Dr. Olick directs the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in Medicine (ELSIM) component of the Practice of Medicine course, required for all first-year medical students. He also teaches third-year medical students in Clinical Bioethics. He has taught courses on medical professionalism, research ethics, bioethics and the law, genetics and the law, and decisions near the end-of-life. He has taught Genetics, Disability, and the Law, and Bioethics and the Law for the Consortium for Culture and Medicine.

His research interests include end-of-life decision-making, the physician-patient relationship, informed consent, the limits of confidentiality, genomic medicine, reprogenetics, genetic discrimination, and the relationship between genetics and research including persons with intellectual disability. He is the author of Taking Advance Directives Seriously: Prospective Autonomy and Decisions Near the End of Life (Georgetown Univ. Press, 2001, 2004) and the co-author (with Robert Weir) of The Stored Tissue Issue: Biomedical Research, Ethics, and Law in the Era of Molecular Genetics (Oxford Univ. Press, 2004).